IT + OT = A Smart Marriage
The “smartest” factories result from a successful marriage of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT). IT and OT have traditionally been structured as disparate and distinctive teams operating independently from one another with somewhat different mission and success factors. This dichotomy has been an impediment to digital transformation, preventing manufacturers from realizing the many benefits of such a union. However, in this age of Industrial Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the hard lines between IT and OT are softening — out of necessity.
You mean IT and OT really do need each other? Yes, they do. In order for IT and OT to understand each other’s roles, objectives and challenges and to create a smart factory that operates at peak productivity, IT and OT silos must be broken down. Experienced OT specialists are very good at understanding standard issues and challenges that arise and are even better at following quality and safety standards. IT specialists bring focused expertise in information processing and data science. Working together, OT specialists can provide the operational expertise needed for their IT partners to create reliable and statistically relevant models and decision-making tools that can be applied to operations.
Look for the unexpected. The OT world is driven by standards, and the operational issues are almost always the same. One area of collaboration for OT and IT is in discovering unexpected anomalies in the data. These anomalies may potentially represent costly areas of high risk that must be effectively mitigated. It is within these areas of dissimilarity that emerging artificial intelligence capabilities — empowered by an effective IT/OT merger — may well bring great value in the future of smart manufacturing.
The ROI of successful IT/OT convergence. With the convergence of IT and OT, manufacturers can apply IT intelligence to the physical components of OT systems, enabling a multitude of opportunities to create positive change in their business. This convergence will lead to many outstanding outcomes such as smarter, more accurate and faster decision making, improved product design, reduced time-to-market, diminished or averted downtime, reduced operations and process variability, increased profit margin and — most importantly — improved customer experience.
How Decisyon has digitalized IT/OT convergence. Decisyon has developed a scalable visual low-code environment called “App Composer” designed to accommodate these IT and OT needs while running on all major IoT platforms such as Azure and AWS. We also developed UI/UX capabilities to achieve OT flexibility and execution requirements — such as manufacturing KPIs and widgets, Kanban, and decision trees to better suit smart manufacturing paradigms. Our subject matter expertise in manufacturing processes and real-world production experiences — in conjunction with this comprehensive product suite — allow Decisyon to provide a practical production-tested pathway that eliminates the gap between IT and OT to produce unsurpassed ROI for customers around the globe.
Blending IT vision with OT expertise for the benefit of the end customer. See how Decisyon App Composer technology has been architected to make it easier than ever to digitize a company’s manufacturing operations by leveraging any software infrastructure scalability and Decisyon’s subject matter expertise in manufacturing and big data.
